Art Pact 137

Here is the plot of my life - man is born, man grows, man dies.

There's a lot of detail hidden there in "Man grows", of course. Let me give you an example. On my twenty-first birthday, having been dropped out of a moving car onto a bridge over the river Creese, I found myself stuck in the middle of a town whose inhabitants did not speak Andrevian, with no money (local or otherwise), and flagrantly in abuse of the local red laws. In Kresford they are not like our own red laws, but the principle is the same - that tourists and other foreigners must wear something to identify them. Just like our own laws, they are there (as the cynics say) to protect foreigners from petty criminals and to expose them to the more complex machinations of the bureaucratic criminals in the local government offices. It was this last lack, rather than money or a command of the Marian tongue, which was to prove my undoing.

It was quick, almost as if the officers had been tipped off beforehand. I knew that this was impossible - my friends, those who drove the car I was thrown out of - would have had to do the tipping off more than a few days in advance, and I had been with them all of that time. You may think that the sort of person who would throw you out of a moving car might not easily be described as a friend, but at least they slowed down to such a pace that I was barely scraped, and it was after a mere five minutes of lying on my back and staring at the patchy blue-and-white Kresford sky that a shadow fell over me.

"Katyin?" A man's voice, heavily accented Marian of the kind for which Kresfordites are mocked by their countrymen. "Katyin, Herri?" Hello? Hello, Sir? - I knew that much at least.

"Katyin kat," I croaked, levering myself up. I thought it best to get things off on the right foot: "Bes tenera, Herri. Spechera Marianisch el." Sorry Sir, I do not speak Marian.

"Apra Herri." The voice said. "Tolist."

That I did not understand, although perhaps I might have picked them out in a language class. As I got myself partially upright, though, made an educated guess. I had expected the voice to have come from a bystander, but of course (as you know), it was not. It was a policeman, dressed in a dark red uniform and carrying a half-moon badge which he was tapping with one out-stretched finger.

"Bes tenera," I said again.

He reached down and helped me to my feet (none too gently, I might add), then indicated that I should follow him by means of a gesture. Having corrected my misconception about his proper title he seemed to accept immediately my assertion that I spoke no Marian and did not attempt to engage me in conversation, even when I attempted to discover our destination by exercising what few words I could either remember from guidebooks or foreign-language films, or by attempting the Andrevian word for a concept, but in a Kresfordite accent (I only tried this once, fearing as the word left my mouth that the policeman might take it for mockery).

Nonetheless, he took me on a quite detailed walking tour of the bayside area of Kresford. I'm sure if my guide had been an attractive young woman in the traditional local dress it would have been quite interesting, but with the uncertainty of my reception at the police station (for I assumed that was where I was being led) hanging over me, I found it difficult to see the town in a positive light. The bayside itself wasn't too bad - a long cobbled road leading south along the bank of the Creese with a lovely view out over the river itself and the docks and quays a few miles down - but when we turned off into the little maze of side alleys around the old marketplace (I'd been there the previous evening drinking), I began to feel unnerved by the claustrophobic way that the geriatric buildings clustered around us, cutting off line of sight so that I could see no more than a few tens of meters ahead of and behind me at any one time, and I began to wonder whether the policeman was a policeman at all or rather a killer who had taken the advantage of meeting someone unprotected by the correct attire for the red laws to exercise his murderous impulses safe in the knowledge that he would not be recognised.

I was soon (fortunately) disabused of this fear. Rounding a corner we emerged from an alley into a small open plaza. Forming the north side of the square (and probably the reason for it) was a third-century-style stronghold-house, a conscious copy, no doubt, of buildings that had been a hundred or so years old when it had been designed. Now all those buildings were gone and this one remained as a poor reminder of the town's more glorious past. Two great flying buttresses extended from the fascia of this edifice, and between them a step-lintelled stone doorway housed two great oak-wood doors, one of which was insolently ajar. The policeman led me to it and then stopped at the threshold of the office, gesturing me inside.

Office it was, for within I discovered not a police station as I had expected, but some sort of government building which it appeared to me served some kind of liason purpose. There were the shields of all nations arrayed around the walls of the atrium, although naturally all of them were smaller than the black-and-grey shield of Marianite-Eastland, and even that was dwarfed by the municipal shield of Kresford that hung beside it. The policeman seemed reluctant to enter himself, but pointed me to a desk at the far side of the hall and waited where he was, sternly ensuring that I followed his instructions. I walked to the desk, bowed politely to the formidable middle-aged lady behind the desk, and greeted her.

"Oh yes," she said, in thickly-accented Andrevian. "Ordered to expect you, we were."